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Blog O' The Month
Pride Beyond Pride, Rep Beyond Rep
Jun
What some call queer representation, I call ‘a book’ – in this case, a book that looks past social conventions of sexuality and identity and towards a more inclusive version of the world that I exist in.
Olivia Blake, author of The Atlas Six
I’m going to be a bit serious this month, because it’s Pride month. I want to pull back the curtain and talk a little bit about what we stock, and why we stock it, and how we stock it – and about the bigger and more nebulous thing called “representation.”
We have a Queer section, on our website and in the shop itself. That’s for non-fiction writing about the personal experience and the political status of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual/aromantic and everything else “queer” – a reclaimed slur that signifies atypicality, otherness, not-like-most-people. But it explicitly stops at non-fiction, of an issues-based nature.
With fiction, we take a different approach. “Queer” is not a genre, and tucking a novel away from the rest of the titles that share its genre merely serves to isolate it, to say “this book is only interesting to queer people because it’s got queer people in it” and condemn it to not being read for any other reason or by any other audience. “It’s queer rep” doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not a book’s to your taste, what else it’s like and not like, what it’s about – and, self-owns on my site profile aside, none of us think readers are so shallow that “queer!” is all they want.
By way of example: some of my favourite books in the last couple of years have been SFF books about empire, and power, and war, and the cost of victory, with lesbian protagonists. It’s a trend, and a trend I enjoy, but to pretend that Gideon the Ninth or The Traitor or A Memory Called Empire are the same as each other – let alone the same as The Mercies or The Murder Wall or Her Body and Other Parties, which also happen to have queer female characters but that’s all they have in common – would be profoundly unhelpful, not to mention disrespectful to authors and readers alike. I’d recommend any of these books to anyone who specifically likes SFF, or historical fiction, or crime, or literary realism, and I’d recommend them to someone specifically looking for WLW representation once I knew what they liked to read.
To keep queer fiction – and queer people – confined to one shelf, and one month, is to fundamentally miss the point in the first place, to achieve representation at the unacceptable price of isolation. Representation is about making visible people who are already here, different from but part of life, and have been all along.
Books About Books
Hardback Fiction
Queer
Queer
Queer
Queer
Publisher of the Month
For Independent Bookshop Week (18th – 25th June) we’re teaming up with Cardiff-based children’s and YA publisher Firefly Press. Firefly are the publishers behind the Monster Max and Grace-Ella series for 7-9s, the rather good Crater Lake and Keeper of Secrets for the 9-12s, Paul Magrs’ Lora trilogy for teen readers and last year’s deep, thoughtful YA debut Grow, by Luke Palmer.
Amy from Firefly (and Book-ish, once upon a time) will be joining us for a special Facebook live event at 6 pm on Saturday 18th June, to kick off the collaboration, read from some upcoming Firefly titles, and announce this year’s Independent Bookshop Week giveaway.
Stand by for pre-order links in their own special blog post!
Events
At the risk of sounding like a giant fanboy, June’s an especially good month for events. Although we’ve had to cancel our evening with Kiran Milwood Hargrave (author of The Deathless Girls, The Mercies, Julia and the Shark and – most importantly for our present purposes – The Dance Tree), I’ll still be joining you in the exalted presence of Ian Rankin at Theatre Brycheiniog, where he and Jude Rogers (of The Sound of Being Human fame) will discuss The Dark Remains. BUT! There’ll still be time to book up for historical fiction doyenne Alison Weir at the Old Rectory in Llangattock, or the Reverend Richard Coles at St. Edmund’s Church just down the road in Crickhowell.
That’s a lot of links, but don’t worry: the short, sweet and simple option is to keep an eye on our events calendar. Just click or tap the image on the right there!
Busy busy busy. Best get on. Here’s a quick pass over what we’re all reading this month – then it’s back to work for me. Keep an eye on the blog for this month’s signed books listing, and I’ll see you next time I’m allowed out of the dungeon.
Jon
Image credit: Adobe Stock. Progress Pride flag by Daniel Quasar.
